The aching void we struggle to fill

There’s a pernicious link between loneliness and weakness, between emptiness and vice.

I like to explain it through one of the hallmarks of classical physics: the noble gas law. This law declares that pressure is a function of the amount of stuff, the space it’s crammed into, and the temperature of the stuff.

An easy way to think of it is to visualize a house party. If there’s a ton of people in one part of the house and other rooms in the house are empty, people are bound to move from the hot, packed place into the cooler, vacant rooms. But if the other rooms in the house were equally crowded and hot, then people wouldn’t be rushing into them, would they? There would likely be, on average, as many people moving out of them as into them.

It’s the same with gases, and in fact physicists first discovered the law that stuff flows from high density to low studying them. But the principle also applies, more abstractly, to the human mind.

When the mind, the heart, the soul, is empty, the “pressure” within is really low, right? When that’s the case, there’s no telling what kind of stuff will come rushing in: thoughts, ideas, feelings, wishes, hopes, fears. Some you may want, most you probably don’t. Nature abhors a vacuum. When a space is empty, there is enormous pressure from without to fill it.

Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to shore up the walls of my mind against a high-pressure outer world whose contents are constantly trying to rush in and fill up the lonely space.

The hardest part, though, is that no one likes to feel empty. Not only are the thoughts, feelings, ideas, and fears that come rushing in often pernicious and harmful, but the emptiness itself is awful. We have all known that feeling to some degree or another: loneliness. It’s a hollow ache, a crater at the center of your being. It’s cold, black silence is deafening. None of us can stand it for long. We crave, we yearn, we ache for that void to be filled. In many ways, I think this is the fundamental human urge. Facing that emptiness is agonizing.

This is the theme of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. The creature Frankenstein creates was not always evil, but isolation and loneliness turned him slowly into a monster.

Because we can’t long endure the emptiness, before long we readily welcome anything that will fill it. It’s simple physics – holding off the outside cacophony of influences, noises, thoughts, ideas, and emotions, all to preserve an aching loneliness, is fighting a losing battle.

So much of what we fill our lives with is just that – filler. It isn’t what we really want to be there – it’s just what happened to rush in when we finally gave up trying to hold the fort. This is really a tactic of distraction, of numbing, designed to keep the mind occupied so as not to remember that what we’ve filled our hearts with is not what we’re truly yearning for.

What we’re truly yearning for is connection, belonging. We want to know where, with whom, we belong. And we want to connect with those people deeply, to know they love us without a shadow of a doubt. And to have the privilege of loving them back.

Unfortunately, true connection is one of the hardest things in the world to cultivate. So, impatient, lonely, and in pain, we substitute true connection with temporary pleasures. We tell ourselves that we’re fine and all but give up hope of finding the real thing. And in the mean time, the once temporary pleasures take root and refuse to leave. And if we do manage to banish them, the empty hollowness they leave in their wake creates a terrible loneliness. So we’re back where we started, struggling for connection; and before long the temporary pleasures have returned fill the hole.

This process – the filling of our empty souls with counterfeits – has been known to humanity since the dawn of time. Greek mythology tells of a man with a hunger that could not be satisfied. He ate everything he could find and yet hungered. In the end, consumed by his emptiness, he devoured the only thing left: himself.

An ancient prophet once taught, “do not spend your money for that which is of no worth, nor your labor for that which cannot satisfy.” Similarly, Jesus said to the woman at the well, “whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.”

Similar truths are taught in Buddhism. Buddhists believe that everything in the physical world – everything you can touch, taste, smell, hear, or see – is in fact hollow. It isn’t real, and the fact that our physical senses can interact with the hollow world is little more than an illusion of the mind. In fact, the only things in the world that are real cannot be seen. Peace, joy, love, connection – these things are real, solid; they can fill the soul, satisfy the aching loneliness.

I’m reminded of  what the fox teaches the little prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s fabulous little book: “anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

Battling loneliness, striving for connection, is one of the most desperate, important battles many of us will ever fight in this life. We need to learn to hold the chaotic world at bay long enough to find, to invite in, to cultivate, what we truly long for. And we need to summon the courage to tell ourselves (and perhaps some of our friends and loved ones, too) that filling a void with hollow things leaves you just as empty as before. Only now you’ve got thistles, weeds, and maybe even baobabs, growing in your heart.